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Hazel McCallion runs Canada’s sixth-largest city. She enjoys deep-sea fishing. She was out Spanish dancing the other night. And she drives herself around in a plug-in electric Chevrolet. She turns 93 Friday.

The phrase “one in a million” is usually used figuratively. When applied to McCallion it might be factually correct.

“It’s remarkable,” says McGill University medicine and psychiatry professor Judes Poirier, referring to the level at which McCallion functions. Poirier was the director of the school’s Centre for Studies in Aging for 11 years.

“These exceptional individuals, they would undergo the natural damage in the brain, losing cells, but they are able to keep aging in check, both in their head and their body.”

McCallion, who has been Mississauga’s mayor for 36 years, certainly does that. She keeps a schedule that would break most 30-year-olds.

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She wakes up every day at about 5 a.m. After getting out of bed she does exercises — stretches and flexes her muscles. She has a bowl of cereal while reading reports and communications sent home by one of her assistants. Her back-to-back meetings and events start as early as 7 a.m. and go as late as midnight.

In a city of 750,000 residents, she reads every one of the dozens of emails and correspondence sent to her office every day. “I don’t take action on all of them,” she says. “Staff responds to most. But I read every one.”

Asked how, at the age of 93, she’s able to function at such a high level, she says, “It’s all hard work.”

Even when she’s not working, she’s working.

“I have some of my best ideas while doing the dishes or when I’m gardening. I keep a notebook and pen handy all the time.”

McCallion says she doesn’t really think she’s particularly unique, able to instantly recall 20-year-old council resolutions, travelling around the world on her own and overseeing an $850-million budget.

Most, including one of her closest friends, Councillor Pat Saito, disagree.

“It’s like she has this hard drive in her head and everything’s in there from the last 93 years.”

Saito recalls a council debate recently about an area of the city that was developed in the mid-’90s. At the time, she and another long-serving councillor, Katie Mahoney, had disagreed with McCallion about how the area should be developed.

“Two or three years ago we were in council dealing with something to do with that subdivision. Hazel repeated exactly what Katie and I had said about the issue 20 years earlier, word for word. She remembers that stuff.”

Poirier, who has done extensive research on centenarians, says that of the almost 6,000 people in Canada over 100 years old, about 50 per cent are living with degenerative disorders linked to aging, such as Parkinson’s. Another 35 per cent have other ailments such as cancer or cardiovascular disease.

He says of the remaining 10 to 15 per cent, only a fraction are as high functioning as McCallion, who’s not quite a centenarian, yet.

“But we’re starting to see more and more like her. It’s a combination of good genetics and living well, being active, passionate and engaged with what you do,” Poirier said.

“The highest functioning centenarians told me there were not enough hours in the day to do everything. I used to think, ‘What the heck, you’re supposed to be taking it easy.’”

“I was at a pharmaceutical conference a few years ago (she also used to be a World Health Organization board member and flew regularly to Geneva for meetings) and was asked to speak. I was scared they were going to ask me what medications I was on. I’m not on any medications.”

Saito says McCallion’s secret is broccoli. “You know her schedule — she has no time. So wherever she has to be, she stops home and steams up some broccoli all the time. That’s what she eats, a green leafy vegetable.”

Asked why, since she feels so good, she’s decided to step down after this term, McCallion responds matter-of-factly.

“I have so many things that I want to do, but can’t because I’m too busy being mayor.”

She says she’ll continue advocating for Mississauga and cities in general, but reels off a long list of offers that have come in: from television and board memberships to consulting gigs and promotional work for organizations, not to mention going through thousands of family slides taken by her late husband, Sam, a photographer.

When Poirier’s advice is mentioned, that she should take some time and write a book about her remarkable life, McCallion fires back.

“My book is being written (by a ghost writer). In fact, I have to read and edit two chapters by next week.”

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